Mirta Ojito, Finding Mañana

April 10, 2005 Sunday
Late Edition - Final

My Enemy, My Friend
By Mirta Ojito.

Mirta Ojito is the author of ''Finding Manana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus,'' to be published by the Penguin Press this month.

One hot evening, toward the end of second grade in Cuba, I stood under the glare of street lights for a school play. With my back bent and a hoe in my right hand, I pretended to work in a rice field. A yellow work shirt, plucked from my father's closet, covered most of my body. A straw hat shielded my face, making my mother's deft makeup -- with black eyeliner she had made my eyes look elongated and narrow -- barely visible. When a chorus of my peers made the sound of helicopters, I looked up in mock terror and dived under the paper grass. Then I got up, wounded and stumbling, and recited a poem against the bad American pilots who were killing innocent children in the placid fields of Vietnam. At the end of the poem, I clutched my chest and collapsed. I did this for two nights.

In 1971, the year I played a Vietnamese, I was a 7-year-old Communist pioneer who had already been made to swear to grow up to be like Che Guevara. Fidel Castro constantly reminded us that we were the hope of the world and that the revolution had been fought so that children like us could receive free education and free health care. For me, born in 1964, five years after Castro seized power, there was no other reality. I didn't know that children who lived elsewhere did not read Ho Chi Minh's biography in second grade or learn their ABC's by conjugating the verb luchar, ''to fight.'' But I knew, intuitively, that I was wrong for the Vietnam play. My hair was thick and wavy, my eyes were rather round and I was too tall and robust to pass for a struggling farmer in Asia. My teacher didn't budge, though: he wanted to earn political points with his superiors, not create believable art.

I hadn't thought about that embarrassing play until June 13, 2002, the day I found Mike Howell, a Vietnam veteran whose job for 18 months had been to support American ground troops by shooting his M-60 machine gun at the North Vietnamese and Vietcong from a helicopter 25 to 50 feet above ground. Just the kind of man I had been taught to fear.

I had been searching for Mike for three years, but I had wondered about him for more than two decades. In the spring of 1980, when Castro allowed thousands of Cubans to leave the island in what came to be known as the Mariel boat lift, Mike, who had sailed to Cuba on a humanitarian mission, rescued me and took me to Key West aboard his boat, Manana. For years, I did not know his name, only the name of his boat.

Through a combination of luck and hard work, I found him, still aboard the Manana. His eyes crinkled and a shy smile curled up his thin lips as he took my hand to help me board his boat, moored in New Orleans. ''I had always wondered what happened to you and yours,'' he said. And just like that, Mike managed to squash the first monsters of my highly politicized childhood and to expose, in a way that no book or research paper ever could, the futility and cruelty of blaming individuals for the flawed decisions of their governments.

Though he said he had never calculated the number of Vietnamese he must have killed, Mike, when asked, ventured a guess: ''Six hundred. I don't know. Eight hundred.'' A pause. ''Perhaps a thousand.'' A longer pause.

It was a good thing Mike couldn't see my face when he told me this during a recent phone conversation. For even if I already knew that the job of a soldier is to kill the enemy, I found the number of deaths that weighed on his soul obscene and grotesque, and I couldn't help thinking, naively and selfishly, Was one of them a child harvesting a field? Mike said he hoped he never killed an innocent person, but he remembered shooting at Vietnamese soldiers as they ran away from the bullets spraying from his helicopter, men who had abandoned the battle and were trying to escape the battlefield as well.

Mike held on to his sanity in Vietnam by also saving lives, perhaps as many as he took. Though not formally trained as a medic, he learned to suck chest wounds, performed tracheotomies and taped cellophane over gaping holes, stabilizing soldiers until doctors could reach them.

At 19, he returned home to New Orleans without his left arm and with two Purple Hearts in his suitcase. Mike said he knew the exact moment the horrors of Vietnam ceased to keep him awake at night. During a particularly difficult therapy session, years before Mariel, his psychologist asked him gently, ''Michael, have you ever wondered how many guys made it out of Vietnam because of you?'' Mike was stunned. He had never included those numbers in his tenuous Vietnam arithmetic: lives taken against lives saved.

When I found him, almost 22 years to the day he rescued my family and me and more than 200 other men, women and children from stormy Cuban waters, I could tell Mike was glad to add a few more check marks to his ''lives saved'' column.

For more information about Captain Mike Howell, the Vietnam veteran who brought the Ojitos from Mariel to Key West on his boat, Mañana, go to www.manana.com

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